The Maris Review, vol 77

Maris Kreizman

21 Oct 2025 — 4 min read

New releases, 10/21

I'm feeling a little under the weather today, a flu-like thing that isn't the flu. And still I was like, you MUST get your newsletter out, even if it's a little shorter than usual. And then I thought, I'll thank all of my readers for their patience. And then I was like, okay but most people read my newsletter for free, they aren't really people I need to answer to. Even so, I'm glad you're here.

What I read this week

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

I was so honored, when Megha Majumdar first published her debut novel, A Burning, to write an introduction to an excerpt from the book that would run on Electric Literature. In that intro I wrote about the urgency in which the novel transpires, the way it reads like a thriller: an impeccably written, philosophically expansive thriller.

A Guardian and a Thief has a similar sense of scope and pacing, a minimalist work that also manages to feel so vivid and so tender. In her second novel Megha once again harnesses the mercy of momentum when exploring intense despair so that the reader doesn't get weighted down by grief. It helps that the book is presented in the form of a kind of countdown. It's the story of Ma, a woman who must figure out how to get herself, her baby daughter, and her father on a flight to America when their visas are stolen by a thief. They live in a near-future version of Kolkata in which climate change has caused disastrous food and water shortages and perilous temperatures, and they will be so lucky to be able to escape to Ma's husband in Michigan if they can simply find their visas in time.

We also meet Boomba, the 20 year-old who was able to squeeze his skinny body between the bars on the windows of Ma's house in order to steal her purse, as well as some of the food that Ma has been taking from the shelter where she works. Boomba is well aware that morality is more a spectrum than an absolute, especially in this nightmare scenario in which nearly every person in India is libel to have their own Jean Valjean moment: "What was absolutely true and right, and what was absolutely false and wrong, and how could any sane person live without crossing the borders every day?" In a world that still values personal responsibility over solutions to systemic problems, it's every man for himself. And if survival is a zero sum game then desperation will make villains of us all.

Joyride by Susan Orlean

If you've been feeling down about the world and about the instability of creative industries particularly, it is exactly the right time to read this ode to curiosity as both a life force and career maker by a master journalist. Susan Orlean's memoir is a rousing antidote to all of the info blips and bullet points and AI slop that the ruling class wants us to put into our brain rather than simply asking questions and developing an interest in the world around us. I still feel so lucky to have been able to have interviewed her in her Hudson Valley home when she was promoting The Library Book.

I think I always understood that Susan's approach to journalism was to come at her subject as an ordinary smart person who wants to understand something new. You can see it in her writing, how her prose is conversational but sharp and how her writing is illuminating without even a hint of condescension. But it still feels revelatory to be reminded that such a simple guiding principle is a highlight of her craft – to be fascinated by something hiding in plain sight, or by people who are unlike her, and to allow the story to guide her rather than the other way around.

In Joyride we get behind the scenes looks at Susan's biggest stories and books, and all of her editors and colleagues, the good and the bad (much respect that she names a few names in both categories). We follow her from her first freelance gigs to becoming a New Yorker writer and a bestselling author and then having had Meryl Streep play her in a movie (the scene in which she meets Charlie Kaufman for the first time is perfect). She also talks about the good old days of Twitter in a way that makes me feel seen ("Twitter wasn't a facsimile of society. It was a new kind of culture, boundaryless and outside of time and space. It kept me company, and amused me, and forced me to figure out how to write well, to be engaging or funny or smart, in a very brief bite," she writes, and YES), and about that one drunken night of posting through it during lockdown, particularly.

Let me leave you with this paragraph from Joyride, because it feels like an optimistic kind of manifesto: